Posted on 12/16/2002 1:11:27 PM PST by knighthawk
On Wednesday night and Thursday morning, the CBC's journalists seemed determined to prove that what their most severe critics say against them is true. Wednesday's The National on TV sent us to bed with a report heavily tilted in favour of Hezbollah, and on Thursday at 8 a.m. World Report on CBC radio woke us up with an account of the same events that was even more pro-Hezbollah.
The public broadcasters had an amazing story to tell us -- not true, just amazing. They implied that Canada made a dreadful mistake in naming Hezbollah a terrorist organization, because we believed an unscrupulous journalist's false report that its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, openly favours spreading terrorist bombing across the world.
If the audiences of The National and World Report accepted what they saw and heard, they now believe there's no proof Hezbollah is devoted to terrorism and no proof Nasrallah preaches murder. Unfortunately, these grossly misleading accounts fit into a disturbing pattern at the CBC. Enemies of Islamist terror often say that on the Middle East the CBC routinely takes the Islamist side and never gives Israel the benefit of the doubt. Bob Rae, the former premier of Ontario, made roughly that case in an impassioned lecture at the University of Toronto six weeks ago. My own impression is that CBC reporters go out of their way to speak gently of Middle East terrorists, but till now I have never seen this tendency so clearly spelled out. The texts of those TV and radio reports make the CBC look spectacularly unfair, both in what it said and (more important) what it left unsaid.
They omitted, for instance, the fact that Hezbollah did more than any other organization to invent contemporary terrorism and make it work. When Hezbollah's truck bomb killed 241 servicemen at a Marine barracks in Lebanon in October, 1983, the U.S. government was so traumatized it withdrew from Lebanon and, in effect, from the war against terrorism.
It may be true that someone put imaginary quotes in Nasrallah's mouth. But if the CBC had been interested in context, it would have quoted one or two of his well-documented statements. In 1998, he said Israel was created by "the grandsons of apes and pigs" and promised to struggle for "Death to America" and "Death to Israel." Last June 6 (according to Hezbollah's Web site), he praised the "efficiency and vitality" of the Palestinian homicide/suicide bombers who randomly slaughter Israeli civilians. "This weapon is the most powerful weapon the Palestinian people could ever have," he said, better than rockets or guns. He condemned any Palestinian who questions either the morality or "the religious legitimacy" of this Islamic martyrdom.
The CBC also left unchallenged a preposterous statement from Hezbollah. The radio reporter, Evan Dyer, said Sheik Hassan Izz el-Dine, a senior Hezbollah leader, claims his movement has no quarrel with Canada or the West and strictly limits its campaign to "Israeli military targets on Lebanese land." Then the sheik said, on tape, "Hezbollah does not have any branches outside Lebanon."
There the CBC left it, ignoring the many intelligence services that would call that statement a lie. An article in The New Yorker on Oct. 28 said Argentine police believe Hezbollah planned the 1994 suicide massacre that killed 85 people at a community centre in Buenos Aires, the deadliest single attack on Jews since the Second World War. That was of no interest to the CBC. In fact, the radio item contained nothing that would have been out of place in a Hezbollah press release.
The night before, The National had managed to find the outlawing of Hezbollah wrong for two reasons, and didn't seem to notice that they contradicted each other. In Beirut, Neil MacDonald (who did acknowledge Nasrallah's support for suicide murder), said the story about Nasrallah's threats had been false; but another reporter, Eric Sorensen, indicated it did not much matter, because others claim "Nasrallah's rhetoric is nothing new" and Ottawa was just looking for a reason to take action. MacDonald summed up: "Is Hezbollah a national liberation movement or, as Israel and its supporters maintain, a murderous global menace? To a great many people in this part of the world, to label Hezbollah a terrorist organization is to choose sides in the defining conflict of the Middle East, an intensely political decision for any government. Neil MacDonald, CBC News, Beirut." Incredibly, that was the CBC's last word on the subject that night.
The CBC left the impression that Hezbollah was innocent because someone claims to have disproved one small item in the case against it. That peculiar way of thinking stirred a distant memory in me, and finally I identified it. That's what used to be called Jesuitical reasoning. George Tyrrell (1861-1909), once famous as a Catholic modernist and no admirer of the Jesuits, wrote that if you accused them of killing three men and a dog, they would invariably produce the dog alive and prove you wrong. Who would expect to find that approach driving the news on our national broadcasting system?
robert.fulford@utoronto.ca
What a great analogy!
See here's the way it works. The Mossad working closely with the CIA and SIS have been secretly hypnotizing Palestinians so they will blow themselves and what ever civilians up. this will give the IDF a reason to kill more Palestinians and increase their budget. And put the blame on that fine civic org. hamas, forcing them to spend less time and money building schools and peace study centers.
< /exteme sarcasm>
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